DM Forcing Characters on Players

[Evilhalfling]

I love making oneshot pregen char.
They tend to have soap opra like ties to other PCs dark secrets, hidden motivations and occasional insanities.

For a campaign - I would hate it. I did it once, for a player I thought was only going to attend 1 game out of 4. The Character was based on his style and the overprotective brother of another PC. It was also intended to lend out as we looked for a new player. He ended up being very regular, and after a month or two retired this character.

of course I clicked the spite button anyway.

 

[Wombat]

I've never done D&D, per se, with pre-genned characters for players, but I have with a lot of other game systems, usually as one-shots or short-runs. It's been kind of a mixed bag, depending on how many characters were offered versus how many playing (best experience was with a GM who created 50% more characters, so that everyone got a true choice), how long the game is going to be, willingness of the players, how the characters were pre-genned, and whether it was possible to alter the characters a bit (i.e. here is your basic character, but you are free to fiddle a few points around and choose your own equipment).

Now I have run Paranoia several different times with pre-made characters, both as player and as Lord High Ultraviolet Godlike Programmer (hee hee) and it has always worked well. OTOH, I was in a GURPS fantasy campaign where we were handed characters by the GM strictly by fiat and that game fell flat within two hours.

A lot depends on the GM, the players, the campaign, and the interaction between all of the above...

 

[UniversalMonster]

I have mixed feelings.

For a short term camapign it wouldn't be bad. I would never- as a DM- impose this on players myself, though. I really believe you should get the character you really want to play as a philosophy.

I have heard of GM's that I like and admire doing this and I have heard players from this sort of campaign say it was an ok experience. Nobody exactly raved about it, but it wasn't pure awfulness.

So there ya go.

We have had a situation where we brought a new player into a group and assigned him to the character sheet of an npc supporter role at the begining as a "try-out" and because it was easier to get the new player in with the group like that. But we got him his own character as soon as he got up to speed on the campaign.

 

[Loghar]

I played in the D&D Open in '02, and as a short campaign, it was fun, but the characters had some weird feats and equipment(the sorc had leather armor and the Run feat). So that wasn't too bad.

I recently started playing a campaign where the DM determined what classes we would get, but it was still fairly open otherwise. Despite the options we received, I wasn't thrilled about forcing one guy to be the cleric.

I voted spite....well, just because, but I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.

 

[Cyberhawk]

I've had my players use pre-gen for one of two reasons:

Either it's a one-shot and the characters/backgrounds are specifically needed for the game I want to run.

And secondly when I'm introducing a new system to the players they can see pre-made characters (theirs and the others in the group) to see a bit of what's available and what the world is like. Again this would be for a 1-shot or intro campaign.

But for my normal games that will, hopefully, go for awhile I would much rather have the players make their own. Generally I like the creativity of what they come up with and the playes have more invested in the characters.

So my answer is mixed: Good for 1-shots, bad for campaigns.

 

[dontpunkme]

Yeah, I've restricted characters from a DM standpoint. Sometimes you just get sick of the same players playing the same character. I've had players that only wanted barbarians, players that only wanted rogues, players that only wanted divine spellcasters of lg gods. Eventually it became pretty evident that all of their characters were more or less the same character. To combat that I've held drafts, blind character selections, restrictions of character/players.

 

[Taluron]

I choose mixed.

Pre-gened characters for one-shots or chort campaigns I've never had a problem with.

Specific restrictions for character generation for a campaign I've never had a problem with.

Pre-gened characters for open campaigns have caused problems more often than not. I really don't like railroading.
Giving or receiving.

Generally we work the railroading into the backgrounds the player make up for their characters.

 

[davidschwartznz]

I voted spite. The DM creating pregen characters is good for a one-off (GREAT if the DM really knows his players), but not for a campaign.

On the other hand, I once ran a Vampire game with European vampires traveling to Hong Kong, and ran a one-off with Demon Hunter X as a break from the main campaign. The characters I created were 'sentai' archetypes. It went so well, I ran a one or two more with the same characters, this time time integrated more with the main plotline. However, I gave my players the choice of swapping characters, which (if IIRC) they did. I suspect if the campaign had not stalled, the vampire characters might have met their demon hunter alter egos.

 

[velm]

I have a two experiences where pregens were handed out. The first one happened when I first started playing, so it was not much of a big deal. It was still loads of fun. The second, and more recent one was a few years ago. No one really complained, the DM explained part of the backstory and everyone bit. It would have been a decent adv had the players not had conflicts with each other, and DM did a better job. He realized that the party was falling apart, so he restarted the campaign from square one with the characters reshuffled with worse results.
So, I would have to say that it depends on the DM's ability to run a decent game and the players willing to go in on it. The biggest drawback to running pregens is the fact that I think players do not feel like they 'own' them.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Mixed reaction.

I've never personally played a character I didn't create, but the first Third Edition game I played had two characters in it that originated as player-played "NPCs" who stuck around after the session they were created for.

Backstory: My character and another PC were magically imprisoned within a forest shack with a half-dozen NPCs by a slightly-disturbed cleric. Long story short, the DM asked two friends of ours to play two of the important NPCs - Isobel and Corvus - for that session, and they, having had a good time, decided to stick around and keep playing those characters.

Their experiences were different. My best friend, an inexperienced roleplayer at the time, played Isobel, and ended up being somewhat sorry that she hadn't simply created her own character, since the choices the DM had made so Isobel would fit the session he'd written her for ended up being somewhat detrimental to the way my friend ended up playing the character.

On the other hand, the other player, much more experienced and knowing that Corvus was to be short-lived (since he joined during a period where the original campaign was split into two groups, and he already had a PC in the other half of the campaign) played him to the hilt, and wasn't even all that sorry when the party murdered him shortly before meeting up with the other half of the campaign.

(Yeah, it was an evil/neutral party. Isobel was a CE werefox cleric of Cyric (and it's the werefox part that ended up getting in the way), and Corvus was a CE fighter rogue who once donned a helm of opposite alignment and declared himself a paladin of Cyric in front of an NPC merchant caravan. Heh.)

Personally, I feel that the DM has the right to veto character concepts that don't fit her world, the rest of the party, or her campaign, but not to pressure players into playing a character which conforms to her vision. As I said, I've never played a DM-created character, but the campaign I mention above was eventually ruined for me when the DM started imposing his own narrative ideas of where the characters (as opposed to the background story of the game) should be going without regard for the players' own ideas about their characters' nature, goals, and choices - which I think is a very similar situation.